CareerBuilder is a global human capital management firm uniting job seekers and employers. Its sales team needed a fast and intuitive contract management solution robust enough to allow for unique customer contract terms, but one that could easily integrate into IT’s custom-built legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Using Skuid, CareerBuilder designed and implemented a fully integrated front end sales and business process management solution 70% faster than it would have taken with out of the box Salesforce features and custom code.
Steven Murdoch, Senior Manager of Sales Operations, said: “I can’t envision a world without it. And even moving forward, most of our enhancements come from ideas submitted by our users. By using the solution and providing feedback, we have created a culture of innovators. Feedback is key to keeping it awesome.”
Challenge
CareerBuilder operates in more than 20 countries and 60 markets, each requiring a custom approach to how it advertises, markets and operates. For each new customer contract, sales must capture customer information and sales terms, properly tag each contract to the applicable market so that only options and discounts applicable to that country are presented to the sales rep, and apply the best combination of contract terms and discounts before the contract is sent through the company’s legacy ERP for approvals.
The process of establishing new contracts in the existing CRM system was onerous. Input and lookup data was distributed across numerous tabs, requiring many clicks. Sales had to consult pricing guides and manually input product names and codes. On the back end, during new contract creation, the existing system required constant data retrieval from the ERP core, via JavaScript. The constant back and forth information flow slowed down contract creation processes while the lack of opportunity mapping meant there was no information available to help sales recognise additional upsell or projection information. This resulted in potentially millions in lost revenue opportunity.
CareerBuilder needed a solution to streamline the contract management process while giving the sales organisation a better user experience to promote adoption and help provide visibility into current and future sales opportunities.
Having already built and implemented smaller applications using Skuid, the company undertook its most complex project yet – Order Builder – a new contract management solution for CareerBuilder’s nearly 200 sales and customer success reps.
Solution
Developed in less than ten weeks, the new Skuid-based Order Builder puts more information in front of sales and customer success faster and in a clean and intuitive interface. The new solution drives user adoption across the enterprise. By eliminating Salesforce’s native twenty-field cap on data presentation, the new front end can call and store more information from the ERP system in real-time. This allows for significantly faster response times and the ability to make strategic decisions about factors such as discounting, pricing adjustment ‘what ifs’, and country-specific add-ons to increase the total contract value. Approvals are also tracked in real-time, giving sales reps and leadership insight into current deals and future pipeline.
With a solid history of success using Skuid, the 10-member development team was quickly able to scope the project and begin work on a new contract management solution. Despite the project requiring an overhaul of the existing tool and integration into an older, legacy ERP system, the new solution was almost entirely declarative, only using less than 100 lines of code versus the usual thousands of lines of new code required for other similar projects with traditional application development processes.
Results
Implementation of Order Builder has yielded benefits for sales, customer success and IT. For sales, the new solution streamlined the entire contract management process, from data entry through approvals. Not only can sales add new deals faster, thanks to automatic data retrieval and entry, but it can track where deals are in the approvals process, helping reps better communicate with customers and stay on top of potential approval problems before they negatively impact customer relationships or jeopardize end-of-quarter sales goals.
The customer success team uses Order Builder to keep tabs on existing customer contracts, ensuring renewals are initiated well in advance of contract closure dates and to better identify opportunities for discounts or to upsell new products and services.
For IT, using Skuid means future enhancements won’t require extensive coding and won’t increase technical debt. New one-click functionality on the client-side, which required data calls and complex calculations back at the ERP system, can be built in hours versus weeks. For agile teams, like CareerBuilder’s, the ability to iterate quickly means more projects get completed on time, bringing additional value to the organisation.
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